Text Messaging and a $130 billion profit pool waiting to be disrupted

So here's the problem as I see it. It's very easy to send SMS via email because most carriers provide an email gateway for their SMS services. However, people use SMS by phone number. The use-by-number paradigm is one that is hard to break, because that is the one thing the carriers won't open up. SMS is tucked into a small portion of the cell signal, which is why the character limit is around 180 characters.<p>It's easy to write a 3rd party solution for smart phones, say like an IM or twitter client. But how do you open access to the hundreds of millions of people with regular phones. I think if someone can figure that out, you have a business model

I always thought that SMS is something that would die along with traditional mobile networks. When new standards like WiMax become fully adopted then mobile carriers become obsolete, as do arbitrary protocols like SMS. We end up with everything-over-IP and short text messages become just another way to receive data (with appropriate costs!).<p>Having said that I think that currently SMS is more convenient than email, and perhaps a new short message standard should be considered to replace SMS. There are tradeoffs, though - if we switch to email then I have a way of receiving messages at multiple locations, eg. indexing my conversations on my PC as well as having them pushed to my device.<p>SMS is definitely a stop-gap that will die out when IP reigns supreme.

Interesting to see how the US is a few years behind Europe (or at least Scandinavia) in the mobile space. Text messaging was all the rage here 5 or 6 years ago.

More like it's an international price-fixing scam waiting to get slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit by the FCC under President Obama.<p>I'd be absolutely shocked if this continues until 2013.

SMS is a great example of "worse is better" paradigm. Several new technologies have tried to challenge it, MMS, advertising supported SMS come to mind. But none of them have really displaced it. I think its got to do with the simplicity. And its usefulness, as an "offline" notification system. Hard to beat the combination.<p>The only thing that could replace it is IM clients on Phones. When each and every phone is always on and when everyone is always signed on, and when operators are nothing more than bit pipes, SMS's will become pointless. Lots of if's though. :)

SMS takes place on the control channel and not the data channel, which has a far more limited bandwidth. This means that SMS messages have to be queued up with control messages, and that a flood of SMS messages can disrupt all cell service in a region. What a stupid design.<p>And how about that price collusion, eh? They've gone up by a factor of 2 in a year for no reason at all related to either CAPEX or OPEX...

I actually quite like SMS. It's cheap enough for anybody to afford yet expensive enough to prevent idiots and spammers which give it a great signal-to-noise ratio. It's ubiquitous, push and fast.<p>There are already alternatives, from e-mail to instant messaging to social networks, but none of them have the ubiquity, standardisation or simplicity of SMS.

SMS is convent, but won't scale as it is. It's fine when you get 1 or 2 a day, but I'm starting to get a dozen. What happens when you have dozenS of messaging coming in and no way to sort, file, etc? Also, SMS is very bad at telling you who sent the message. How many times have you gotten an text from a number that's not in your phone book.<p>Someone needs to create an alternative. Maybe it can be done on top of twitter.

Built-in Google Chat on my G1 has completely replaced text messaging for anyone else with a G1 (or anyone who is sitting in front of gmail).<p>Not only is it free (with unlimited data plans), it's better than SMS because it adds presence, away messages, and the ability to instantly take a PC-based IM chat on the road, or vice versa.

I think something like Facebook might be in a good position to do an SMS replacement app and put some muscle behind it. Most people I know are on there already, and others would probably join if they could send SMS's for less money.